Exclusive: Airbnb’s new font holds the secret to design’s future

In this new world, fonts have to carry a greater burden. They have to tell your brand story, in ways that scale up to the size of a massive billboard. And, at the same time, they have to work as a label on a tiny UI button. Two years ago, Airbnb embarked on a quest to solve that challenge with its type design partner, the legendary foundry Dalton Maag. The resulting typeface, called Cereal, hits the world today across Airbnb’s web properties and app. Though it’s currently limited to 12 languages using the Latinate alphabet, the plan is to extend the family to 25 languages, from Russian to Chinese, in the next two years.

Even if you don’t care about fonts, Cereal is a useful example of how an organization’s broader challenges reflect themselves in the details–and how